Hence it is not surprising to find a memorial, drawn up apparently by Argenson, and addressed to the council of state, asking for instructions when and how a governor—lieutenant-general for the king—ought to receive incense, holy water, and consecrated bread; whether the said bread should be offered him with sound of drum and fife; what should be the position of his seat at church; and what place he should hold in various religious ceremonies; whether in feasts, assemblies, ceremonies, and councils of a purely civil character, he or the bishop was to hold the first place; and, finally, if the bishop could excommunicate the inhabitants or others for acts of a civil and political character, when the said acts were pronounced lawful by the governor.
The reply to the memorial denies to the bishop the power of excommunication in civil matters, assigns to him the second place in meetings and ceremonies of a civil character, and is very reticent as to the rest. *
Argenson had a brother, a counsellor of state, and a fast friend of the Jesuits. Laval was in correspondence with him, and, apparently sure of sympathy, wrote to him touching his relations with the governor. “Your brother,” he begins,
* Advis et Résolutions demandés sur la Nouvelle France.
“received me on my arrival with extraordinary kindness;” but he proceeds to say that, perceiving with sorrow that he entertained a groundless distrust of those good servants of God, the Jesuit fathers, he, the bishop, thought it his duty to give him in private a candid warning which ought to have done good, but which, to his surprise, the governor had taken amiss, and had conceived, in consequence, a prejudice against his monitor. *
Argenson, on his part, writes to the same brother, at about the same time. “The Bishop of Petræa is so stiff in opinion, and so often transported by his zeal beyond the rights of his position, that he makes no difficulty in encroaching on the functions of others; and this with so much heat that he will listen to nobody. A few days ago he carried off a servant girl of one of the inhabitants here, and placed her by his own authority in the Ursuline convent, on the sole pretext that he wanted to have her instructed, thus depriving her master of her services, though he had been at great expense in bringing her from France. This inhabitant is M. Denis, who, not knowing who had carried her off, came to me with a petition to get her out of the convent. I kept the petition three days without answering it, to prevent the affair from being noised abroad. The Reverend Father Lalemant, with whom I communicated on the subject, and who greatly blamed the Bishop of Petræa, did all in his power to have the girl given up quietly, but
* Lettre de Laval à M. d’Argenson, frère du Gouverneur, 20
Oct, 1659.
without the least success, so that I was forced to answer the petition, and permit M. Denis to take his servant wherever he should find her; and, if I had not used means to bring about an accommodation, and if M. Denis, on the refusal which was made him to give her up, had brought the matter into court, I should have been compelled to take measures which would have caused great scandal, and all from the self-will of the Bishop of Petræa, who says that a bishop can do what he likes, and threatens nothing but excommunication.” *
In another letter he speaks in the same strain of this redundancy of zeal on the part of the bishop, which often, he says, takes the shape of obstinacy and encroachment on the rights of others. “It is greatly to be wished,” he observes, “that the Bishop of Petræa would give his confidence to the Reverend Father Lalemant instead of Father Ragueneau;” ** and he praises Lalemant as a person of excellent sense. “It would be well,” he adds, “if the rest of their community were of the same mind; for in that case they would not mix themselves up with various matters in the way they do, and would leave the government to those to whom God has given it in charge.”***
One of Laval’s modern admirers, the worthy Abbé Ferland, after confessing that his zeal may now and then have savored of excess, adds in his defence, that a vigorous hand was needed to